History's 9 Most Insane Rulers

By Scott Rank

Madness and Power.

Can the insane rule? Can insanity be a leadership quality? Scott Rank says yes (well, sometimes) in this fascinating look at nine of history’s most notorious rulers, from the Roman emperor Caligula to the North Korean Communist dictator Kim Jong-il.

Rank paints intimate portraits of these deeply flawed but powerful men, examining the role that madness played in their lives, the repercussions of their madness on history, and what their madness can tell us about the times in which they lived.

In History’s 9 Most Insane Rulers, you will meet:

• King Charles VI of France, who thought he was made of glass
• Sultan Ibrahim I, who was driven mad by the sadistic succession battles of the Ottoman Empire
• Caligula, who built temples to himself and whose reign highlighted the lethal tensions between the power of the new Imperial Rome and the prerogatives of the old Roman Republic
• The Russian tsar who became known as Ivan “the Terrible”
• King George III of Britain, who not only lost his American colonies, but lost his mind as well
• Bavaria’s “Mad” King Ludwig II, who left the world richer for his fabulous fairy tale castles and his patronage of the composer Richard Wagner

Insane rulers did not die off with the last of the mad monarchs who inherited their power. Rank also examines the rise to power of crazed modern rulers, such as Idi Amin, who began as a lowly army cook and rose to the presidency of Uganda, and Saparmurat Niyazov, who ruled Turkmenistan and promoted a bizarre cult of personality around himself.

Both entertaining and illuminating, History’s 9 Most Insane Rulers is a must-read for anyone interested in the role insanity has played in history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Regnery History
• Release date: May 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781684510252

Scott Rank

SCOTT RANK is the author of twelve books, including The Age of Illumination: Science, Technology, and Reason in the Middle Ages, Lost Civilizations, and Off the Edge of the Map: Travelers and Explorers That Pushed the Boundaries of the Known World. His books have been translated into nine languages. A historian of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey, he is a professor and podcaster. He currently hosts the show History Unplugged, one of the most popular history podcasts today. He earned his Ph.D. in history from Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Before going down the academic route he worked as a journalist in Istanbul. He lives in Kansas City with his family.

Book preview

Cover: History’s 9 Most Insane Rulers, by Scott Rank

Praise for

HISTORY’S 9 MOST INSANE RULERS

"History’s 9 Most Insane Rulers is a timely and salient wake-up call. At once an entertaining history lesson and cautionary tale, Scott Rank’s book chronicles a host of unhinged and megalomaniacal rulers and assesses their relative madness. Much food for thought and reflection here."

—BUDDY LEVY, bestselling author of Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition

"A king who thought he was made of glass. A tsar who alternated between being a pious monk and a hedonistic mass murderer. An emperor who thought he was divine and who elevated his horse to high office. These are just a few of the fascinating (and certifiable!) rulers you will meet in History’s 9 Most Insane Rulers by Scott Rank. Dr. Rank writes in an engaging style that will make it hard for you to put the book down. Read this book … you’ll be glad you did!"

—JAMES EARLY, professor of history at San Jacinto College

History is replete with unfortunate leaders who have burdened their people with their own ego, idiocy, vengeance, and madness. Scott Rank’s book describes them in detail and supplies ample stories that will make you think. From a leader who turned the lights off in the capital city and demanded his people be home by curfew, to another who made the nation quit smoking because he did, to one who broadcasted names of citizens on the radio to be targeted, this book is food for thought and a chill down the spine at the same time.

—BRUCE CARLSON, host of the My History Can Beat Up Your Politics podcast

"Kings, princes, dukes, and presidents throughout history have been required to make decisions under the most difficult of circumstances. Pressure can force even the best leaders to falter, but what if the leader is mentally unstable? This is what Professor Scott Rank explores in History’s 9 Most Insane Rulers. Professor Rank provides the reader with a sample of world leaders throughout history whose mental health damaged their realms. He brings alive examples from the mildly unstable all the way to purely diabolical sovereigns who massacred their populations indiscriminately. You will be shocked to discover the depths of depravity some rulers went to and the role of poor mental health in the actions of these horrible rulers."

—STEPHEN GUERRA, host of the History of the Papacy Podcast

"Scott’s always had a gift for making history fun, engaging, and applicable to the present. History’s 9 Most Insane Rulers is no exception. He’s done it again!"

—GREG JACKSON, host of the History That Doesn’t Suck podcast and assistant professor of Integrated Studies at Utah Valley University

History’s 9 Most Insane Rulers by Scott Rank, Regnery History

For Ellie

Not to imply that you will ever be on this list

INTRODUCTION

Are world leaders today more insane?

A sizable number of mental health professionals are asking this question, prompted by a global growth in populist politicians, with Donald Trump topping the list. Among other mental health problems, according to professionals, Trump suffers from narcissistic personality disorder, as evidenced by a social media logorrhea so intense that his Twitter feed alone serves as diagnostic proof.

John Gartner, Ph.D., is the founder of Duty to Warn, an organization focused on warning the United States that Trump’s alleged mental illness poses a grave threat to America. His petition has over sixty thousand signatures from mental health professionals. It seeks constitutional action:

We, the undersigned mental health professionals … believe in our professional judgment that Donald Trump manifests a serious mental illness that renders him psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of President of the United States. And we respectfully request he be removed from office, according to article 4 of the 25th amendment to the Constitution, which states that the president will be replaced if he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.¹

Along with Trump, the rise of populist politicians in the Philippines, Brazil, and Italy suggests a trend of major heads of state in democracies becoming unhinged to mental health professionals. Clearly, many voters are tolerating leaders whose actions would have once been considered so outlandish as to disqualify them from office.

Rodrigo Duterte, elected president of the Philippines in May 2016, campaigned on ending endemic drug trafficking by killing thousands of criminals. But Duterte’s ugly personality was made clear by his lewd approach to a reporter asking a softball question. On another occasion, he used profanity against the pope, even though the Phillipines is an overwhelmingly Catholic country. When devout voters pushed back, Duterte defended his actions and his salt-of-the-earth persona. I am testing the elite of this country, he said. Because we are fundamentally a feudal country.

Beyond his crudeness, Duterte rambles on in a way suggestive of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, peppering his speeches with inscrutable jokes, wild exaggerations, and profanity, as if there are no barriers dividing his emotions, thoughts, and behavior. In an outburst against Barack Obama for the latter’s criticism of the Philippines’ human rights abuses, Duterte used the Tagalog phrase putang ina, which means, literally, Your mother is a whore and is also used in frustration, as in son of a bitch.²

Duterte is hardly alone among boorish world leaders. Brazilian president and fellow populist demagogue, Jair Bolsonaro, has made casual jokes about racism, rape, prostitution, and torturing opponents while on the campaign trail. Since I was a bachelor at the time, I used the money to have sex with people, he bragged to a Brazilian newspaper in 2018 on the usage of his congressional housing allowance. When talking about visiting a settlement of quilombos, Brazil’s black slave descendants, he noted that the fittest among them weigh 230 pounds and do nothing … They are not even good for procreation. In 2014, Congresswoman Maria de Rosario claimed that Bolsonaro had encouraged rape during an argument with her. He responded that Rosario was not worth raping; she is very ugly.³

Perhaps the most well-known showman-turned-politician in modern European politics is former Italian president Silvio Berlusconi, whose self-descriptions suggest delusions of grandeur and exaggerated self-importance. He called himself the best political leader in Europe and in the world … there is no one on the world stage who can compete with me. He was equally outrageous in deflecting questions on scandals in his private life, specifically on relations with younger women and prostitutes: I never understood where the satisfaction [of paying for sex] is when you’re missing the pleasure of conquest.⁴

Why are populists winning political offices when their actions and comments would have destroyed a political campaign not long ago? Political scientists and journalists have offered their explanations. Author Noah Millman points to Friedrich Hegel’s Anerkennung, or recognition. All humans seek recognition from others. In the twenty-first century, traditional societies lost a sense of recognition in the post–Cold War world of globalization and cultural progressivism. Accelerating urbanization, the collapse of traditional families, and a reduction of the labor force in relation to stock market growth have led to traditionalists turning away from elites and toward populist politicians, who recognize them.⁵

The discussion of populist rulers’ sanity or lack thereof naturally led to Donald Trump in 2016. Since Trump’s election, hundreds of mental health professionals have tried to diagnose him. Dozens have come together to make joint statements. Bandy Lee edited a 2017 book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. She and others warned that Trump was an existential threat to the United States who needed confinement, evaluation, and removal from the presidency. Contributors Philip Zimbardo and Rosemary Sword connected his impulsivity with unbridled and extreme present hedonism.

Justin Frank, author of Trump on the Couch, psychoanalyzed him by looking at historical records from Trump’s family, his early years, and his own public record. Other sources include Trump’s personal and presidential Twitter feeds. According to his diagnosis, which Frank called frightening, Trump desperately sought attention and approval from his family. His older brother, Fred Jr., pushed hard to succeed and follow in his father’s footsteps as a businessman, succumbed to alcoholism, and died at the age of forty-three. Donald saw the chance to become the favored son and earn the approval of his father, Fred Sr., a demanding, narcissistic, and authoritarian figure. But he rebelled. Fred Sr. tried to counter Donald’s rebelliousness by enrolling him in the New York Military Academy in the eighth grade. Donald never got over feelings of rejection and abandonment. To cope, professionals say he formed dangerous mental traits such as grandiosity, projection, bullying, fear of weakness and shame, lack of empathy, and habitual lying. These traits surface in the president today to counter his preternatural anxiety, which is exacerbated whenever he perceives himself inadequate.⁶

Whatever the danger Donald Trump’s mental health poses to the United States and the world at large, when compared to other leaders past and present, he is not the outlier certain mental health professionals believe. As we will see, Trump’s psychological well-being is no worse than that of many past leaders. Even if it were, recent precedent dictates that nobody but his own therapist should say so due to the Goldwater Rule. The American Psychiatric Association enacted that rule after mental health professionals questioned the sanity of another controversial presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, in 1964. According to the rule, psychiatric professionals should not give an opinion on any public figure they have not examined in person.

If one looks at history, it is obvious that Trump is not even close to being one of the worst mad rulers. The truly mad rulers compete at a completely different level.

---

This book will look at the lives of the most insane leaders in history and how they led their kingdoms, nations, and empires with frayed connections to reality. It explores the addictive nature of power, the effects it has on those who cling to it for too long, and methods by which mad rulers lead without their full mental faculties intact. It also questions why senior government officials tolerate these leaders’ actions for so long. Finally, it asks if insane rulers are relics of the past and have died out in the age of democracy.

Before venturing too far in our analysis of mad rulers, we must define what madness is. Doing so is challenging, as there is no universally accepted clinical definition of madness. The term covers a spectrum of abnormal behavioral and mental patterns, everything from agoraphobia to the condition formerly known as multiple personality disorder. Doctors have been arguing about the origins of madness since the beginning of medicine. Some thought insanity was a disease of the soul. Traditional societies believed the source was evil spirits that needed to be exorcised. Others thought it was a disease of the body. Ancient Greeks regarded madness as an imbalance in bodily humors (the four chemical systems that were thought to regulate human behavior: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile).

Social and cultural dimensions are also crucial to understanding madness. It has been recognized in every known society throughout history, but it is always filtered through that society’s particular understanding of the world and its specific criteria for what makes one sane or insane. Andrew Scull, author of Madness in Civilization, notes that stories of madness are found in the most ancient written sources. The Old Testament is full of such stories. In one episode, King Saul, the first monarch of the Israelites, falls into madness for failing to follow God’s order to destroy completely the enemy of Israel, the Amalekites. David, on the other hand, Saul’s nemesis and son-in-law, feigned madness himself while seeking refuge from Saul’s jealousy and growing madness in the court of an enemy king of Israel, foaming at the mouth, according to the Bible, to escape being killed by that king too. An early record of method to madness on the part of David.

Perhaps the most famous episode of biblical madness involves Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king. He conquered Jerusalem, destroyed Solomon’s temple, and took the young Daniel and other Israelites into captivity. Daniel became one of his close advisers and saw the onset of Nebuchadnezzar’s madness. Nebuchadnezzar boasted obnoxiously about his power, finally moving God to act. Forced from his palace, Nebuchadnezzar went into the wilderness, his mind shriveled to the level of an ox. There he ate grass, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagle’s feathers, and his nails like bird’s claws. The king remained in that state for seven years, until he acknowledged that God ruled his kingdom, not him. With Nebuchadnezzar’s reason returned to him, he praised God and proclaimed that His dominion lasts forever.

Whatever the truth of this story, the Old Testament treats Nebuchadnezzar’s case of madness as a divine curse, not a biological one. Other ancient accounts of madness also describe it in supernatural terms—Greece and Rome treated the mentally ill with the temple medicine of the god Asclepius and used charms, purification rites, and spells.

There has also been the idea of sacred madness. The holy fool played a leading role in the imagination of medieval Christendom. Like a biblical prophet who flouts society’s conventions to serve a religious purpose, the holy fool reveals truths hidden to the wise. Most famous is Basil the Blessed, a Russian Orthodox saint known as a yurodivy, or holy fool for Christ. Born in the late fifteenth century, he went naked and weighed himself down with chains to show contempt for his own flesh and to shun any recognition. But with this rejection of the world came total freedom to scorn wickedness. When Ivan the Terrible moved toward Pskov after devastating Novgorod in the sixteenth century, Basil alone stood up to him. Russian medievalist Eugene Vodolazkin recounts one legend in which Basil offered Ivan a piece of raw meat out of hospitality. Ivan responded that he did not eat meat during the fast. Basil retorted that the tsar had done far worse by devouring the flesh of Christians. Startled, the tsar returned to Moscow without harming the people.⁷

Over time, more scientifically based methods arose to understand and treat madness. The followers of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates and later the Greco-Roman physician Galen considered madness to result from mental and physical conditions. As treatment methods evolved, the public, however, clung to many old beliefs and remained skeptical of doctors’ abilities to cure madness well into the nineteenth century. The Renaissance artist Hieronymus Bosch provides an excellent example of this skepticism with his 1494 satirical painting The Cure of Folly: The Extraction of the Stone of Folly. A doctor donning a dunce’s cap uses a scalpel to draw from a patient’s scalp the cause of his madness.⁸

Because the origins of madness are so heavily disputed by mental health experts, this book will only concern itself with the effects of insanity, not its causes. We will use the legal term for insanity, regarding a defendant’s capacity to determine right from wrong in the case of a crime. It is defined as mental illnesses of such a severe nature that a person cannot distinguish fantasy from reality, cannot conduct her/his affairs due to psychosis, or is subject to uncontrollable impulsive behavior.⁹

This is the launching point from which we will analyze the psychosis, megalomania, and paranoia of the rulers in question.

Based on this definition of insanity, the nine leaders in this book were chosen based on one of three criteria. The first is dissociation from reality. France’s King Charles VI thought he was made of glass and could shatter at any moment. Ottoman sultan Ibrahim believed he was a king from a fairy tale and ordered a massive tax to fund the decoration of his palace in sable fur. The second criterion is psychopathy and lack of remorse. Ivan the Terrible personally tortured, raped, and murdered his subjects. Idi Amin killed up to half a million Ugandans in the 1960s and ’70s for vague political goals. The third criterion is narcissistic personality disorder and megalomania. Caligula referred to himself as a god and demanded to be worshipped as such. Turkmen president Saparmurat Niyazov renamed days of the week and months of the year after himself and his family. Kim Jong-il required his portrait to be displayed in every North Korean home alongside one of his father’s.

---

Each chapter in this book explores the life and reign of a different insane ruler. It asks six questions about each ruler’s time in power. First, from what sort of madness did he suffer? Second, how effective was he at ruling despite mental illness? Third, was he insane before or after he started ruling? Fourth, how did his madness affect his citizens? Fifth, and most paradoxical, did any of these leaders’ madness inadvertently make for greatness for themselves or their nations?

The question of insanity’s inadvertent usefulness poses a sixth and last question. Against all reasonable expectations, can madness in and of itself be a source of greatness, or even genius? It is not a new question. German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer asked it in his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation:

It has often been remarked that there is a side at which genius and madness touch, and even pass over into each other, and indeed poetical inspiration has been called a kind of madness: amabilis insania, Horace calls it. … It might seem from this that every advance of intellect beyond the ordinary measure, as an abnormal development, disposes to madness.

Great statesmen and military leaders from Napoleon to Abraham Lincoln to John F. Kennedy struggled with mental illness. Nassir Ghaemi, director of the Mood Disorders Program at Tufts Medical Center, wrote in A First-Rate Madness that the very qualities that mark those with mood disorders make for the best leaders in times of crisis. Lincoln suffered from severe depression, as did Winston Churchill; both contemplated suicide. Removed from command over questions of his sanity, Civil War general William Sherman experienced a manic episode with paranoid delusions and wrestled with bouts of severe depression and suicidal thoughts. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi both attempted suicide while adolescents.¹⁰

Psychological studies have shown that depression can be a source of enhanced realism and increased resilience. Well-heeled sane men such as Neville Chamberlain were lackluster compared to the boldness of Churchill’s leadership in World War II. Abraham Lincoln used fortitude developed over a lifetime of fighting crippling depression to follow his destiny of abolishing slavery and preserving the Union. He believed that his melancholia helped prepare him for the great challenges he faced during the Civil War. The massive death tolls and horrors of the battlefield did not incapacitate him; Lincoln had spent decades learning to overcome setbacks in his own battered psychology.

Rulers who were mad by our definition could actually have been responding in the most reasonable way in their circumstances. They faced challenges that are unimaginable today. Ivan the Terrible killed thousands of his own subjects, but he did so (by his own reasoning) to secure the Russian Empire against external threats after the Mongols had slaughtered millions across Eurasia three centuries earlier. Caligula behaved horribly toward the Roman Senate and aristocracy, but it could have been a calculated attempt to demean them and weaken their power, elevating himself to a full monarch and thus best serving the interests of the masses by crushing corrupt politicians. From their perspectives, being mad was perhaps the most appropriate way to rule in mad times.

With these questions in mind, let us look at the nine most insane rulers in history.

CHAPTER ONE

ROMAN EMPEROR GAIUS CALIGULA

AD 12—AD 41

When Salvador Dalí set out to paint a depiction of the infamous Roman emperor Caligula in 1971, he chose to depict the thing nearest and dearest to the emperor’s heart: his favorite racehorse, Incitatus. The painting Le Cheval de Caligula shows the pampered pony in all his royal glory. It is wearing a bejeweled crown and clothed in purple blankets. While the gaudy clothing of the horse is historically correct, the Spanish surrealist artist managed perhaps for the only time to understate the strangeness of his subject matter.

Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (Caligula) was born in AD 12 and reigned from 37–41. He was the first emperor with no memory of the pre-Augustan era—that is, before emperors were deified—and had no compunction about being worshipped as a god. As the object of a cultus, the boy emperor believed in his own semidivine status and saw no reason not to follow whatever strange desire entered his mind, such